Want to get your hands on the new Photos.app for OS X? Now’s your chance—for free. Apple has release a public beta of OS X 10.10.3, and anyone can try it out. Just be sure not to do this on your primary/only system, m’kay?

Darkroom is one of the newest iOS photo editing apps to gain popularity. While it’s a little light on adjustments, it does offer curves. But two of its best features are the ability to save your own filter presets, and an infinite history list!

With Aperture no longer being developed and OS X Photos not making muster for professionals and advanced users, many of us are looking at Lightroom. How does Lightroom’s keyword tagging capability stack up to Aperture?

According to several rumor sites, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom version 6 has been leaked by retail stores in France and Australia for a March 9th, 2015 release date. The primary feature I’m seeing excitement around is GPU acceleration.

According to the early reviews, the current beta of Photos lacks the metadata and ratings power of Aperture. Photo Mechanic offers a possible solution, if you need metadata control but are determined to use Photos.

I’m going to kick off the “non-Aperture, non-Photos” posts with something crazy advanced. Luminosity masks are not for the faint of heart, but once you get your head around them, WOW you can do amazing things. I’m not going to try to teach you this stuff — I barely get it myself! — but I am going to point you in the right direction.

Photos for OS X is – and isn’t – a lot of things. It is an awesome app, but it isn’t an Aperture replacement. That much we speculated in advance, and now we know it to be certain. So the big question is… will it ever be? And how will this site evolve to support that answer?